How to Raise An Adult

Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare your Kid for Success

"In How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims draws on research, conversations with educators and employers, and her own insights as a mother and student dean to highlight the ways in which over-parenting harms children and their stressed-out parents. She identifies types of helicopter parents and, while empathizing with parents' universal worries, offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success. Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twentysomethings, this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence"-- Provided by publisher.

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This is interesting food for thought on something that might not occur to many parents - how doing everything for your child can harm them later in life. It discusses such things as the college testing and the extracurricular activity arms race and parents trying to get their kids into name-brand universities when they may be happier at a lesser known school. Overparenting definitely happens in this area.

More a morale booster than a practical guide, its main focus is on affluent families with college-bound teens. I appreciate its message that such kids need to learn more self-sufficiency and parents need to get out of their way. But I would disagree that it's "liberating" to encourage teens to apply not just to the top 10 colleges, but the top 100: even those are out of reach (not to mention unaffordable) for the majority of modern families, though maybe not in the author's rarefied world. And she doesn't even conceive of a world where kids might choose to skip college altogether.

This book is for parents who are micro-managing their kids into college and their careers. If you're looking for help on how to raise an independent, self-reliant, and confident child, don't expect to get it from this book. The author mostly quotes other experts and gives lots of examples of children that have way too much dependence on their parents. However, there is little in the way of constructive advice on how to parent them so they are self-reliant and learn life-skills.